Assistant Professor of History, Virginia Wesleyan College

About

Kathleen B. Casey is an Assistant Professor in the History Department and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Virginia. She received her doctorate in History and certification in Gender and Women’s Studies in 2010 from the University of Rochester, where she received the Susan B. Anthony Award for Most Distinguished Dissertation in Women’s Studies. After serving as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Rochester from 2010 to 2011, she was a Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Honors College from 2011 to 2012.

Professor Casey’s area of expertise is late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American cultural and social history. Her research and teaching interests include modern American popular and material culture, gender and sexuality, and African-American history. Her first book, The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville (University of Tennessee Press, 2015) explores performances of gender and race from 1900 to 1930. Her current project, The Things She Carried: Women and the Power of the Purse, is a cultural and social biography of the purse, which explores how and why purses became intimately linked with evolving understandings of gender, travel, waged work, and modernity.